Network services are widely deployed in networks. Such network services may be defined as service-functions that form a “service-function chain.” A service-function chain is a sequence of service-functions hosted on a set of service nodes and that are applied to data packets traversing the service-functions. Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comments (RFC) 7665 defines a service-function chaining architecture; however, RFC 7665 does not support a variety of service-function chain deployment or use cases. Such unsupported use cases include a receive-only service-function, traffic flow offloading by a service-function, load balancing across a cluster of stateful service-function instances, a service-function that performs network address translation (NAT) and/or port address translation (PAT), and a service-function that performs service path reclassification.